1. The Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to parsing of text information for readability and analysis, and more particularly relates to the segmentation and display of patent claim text for readability and analysis.
2. The Relevant Technology
Review of issued patents and published patent applications are essential steps in the preparation of new patent applications and in the development of new products. Prior to the availability of personal computers and the Internet, such reviews were done with paper copies of the relevant patent documents. As such, there was a practical limit to the number documents that can be reviewed at any one time. However, with the advent of high performance personal computers with advanced word processing software and the ubiquitous availability of Internet access, large numbers of relevant documents can be retrieved with ease. The improvement in technology has paradoxically made the review of patents a more difficult task mainly due to the large volume of materials retrieved. This is particularly difficult for engineers and product development managers who are unfamiliar with the arcane and highly structured language of patent documents. There exists a need for a method to enable a large number of documents to be analyzed rapidly and converted into a form that is more easily digested by a reader, particularly a reader that is not familiar with terminology specific to patent claims. Such a method should preferably be rapidly executable, and therefore must not be too computationally intensive. Further, there exists a need for a method of displaying the results of the analysis in a manner that facilitates rapid understanding and, where desired, more in-depth analysis.